The Heavy Stuff

The Heavy Stuff (THS) welcomes you to the blog dedicated to taking positions on realities greatest mysteries - and today’s installment - `time travelers’. Why time travelers you ask? Well, recently the mainstream media has trotted out the movie staple of time travel in association with the soon to be turned on Atom Smasher in Switzerland - which will produce an energy concentration unlike any since the big bang. And, some folks have speculated that it could provide a chance for humans from the future to return to our time via a closed time-like curve. (Others have said it could create a black hole that could end Earth too).

While such speculation is harmless fun and brings to mind the fantasy speculations about how to kill your grandfather - thereby eliminating any chance of you being born - THS wants to predict that NO travelers will show up soon, next year, or probably EVER. This is a link to the article about such speculation - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/02/06/scitime106.xml - as you can see, the article is from February - and according to the website for the facility http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/Spotlight/SpotlightLastPuzzle-en.html - the experiment and machine is not quite yet ready.

But, as THS predicts, it won’t happen. No travelers are going to arrive in the here now. And it won’t happen for all the logic you have come to depend upon and for reasons you probably have never considered.

And, for reasons that you have never probably considered - I reference one of THS’s favorites from www.anomalist.com — from their `A’ `files’ list (which has some incredible reading by the way) — here’s that direct link http://www.anomalist.com/afiles/timetravel.html (quite an article, don’t you think?). To THS, the highlights of the A Files article are:

the moment we activate our fiendishly complex  Time Machine, we sidestep physical law, becoming a stationary non-entity relative  to the rest of the cosmos. We are unaffected by macro-gravitation. When and if we  finally re-enter normal space/time, the Earth is nowhere to be found, nor is the  rest of our solar system. Depending on the intensity and duration of our “time  warp,” we may find ourselves deep in interstellar space–with no recognizable  constellations to guide us home–or even outside of the Milky Way altogether, lost  in the intergalactic void. At this point, we come to fully appreciate the expanding universe theory, and we  realize that time travel is not all it’s cracked up to be

Indeed, if we didn’t live on a `world’ this time travel might not be so difficult. But, we live on a spinning and a `traveling’ planet.  A traveling space. A traveling planet with multiple routes - around the sun, around the milky way, and with the milky way as part of a galactic journey. Nevermind that the planet we are on - spins.

Literally, the `space’ which each of us `are’/`is’ - is traveling at a small fraction of the speed of light each moment.

Remember, the `time traveler’ will need to leave their `space-time’ to get to that `earth location’ of the past - this is the `stepping-out’ the article is referring to. Literally to `GO’ to a  new `elsewhen-location’ - to `pop-in’ to a different REAL than the one `left behind’. A REAL that has already occurred (for them-the time traveler) for them in the `distant’ past.

The anomalist.com article goes on with this:

Come to think of it, the only way a time traveler might emerge from the alternate-time-effect and find himself back on Earth, at some past or future date, would be if the Earth  was indeed stationary, at the virtual center of the universe. Charles Fort would  have fun with this concept, I can imagine………….According to more than a few theorists in the Quantum Gravity vision of Time, “particle”  is our perceptual high-speed “snapshot” of where we are at any given  point in Time. Being that apparent sub-atoms exist from the beginning of the universe  to the end in one long, coiled, synchronously-conscious entity, they must pass through  a diversity of incarnations, from slime-to-leaf-to-animate. So the molecules and  atoms and sub-atoms that make up our bodies and brains, and which we perceive as  “in existence at this point in time,” are actually recycled through many  different animates and inanimates over many ages. In fact, the human body is cellularly recycled entirely every 7 years, meaning  that our past and future atomic and subatomic components are out there in a compost  heap beyond 7 years somewhere in the past or the future.

When one begins to take into consideration of just a few of these points above - the notion of travelers from the `future’ - begins to more and more seem to be nothing more than silly movie plots.

Just changing the perspective a bit, closer to reality - may help this understanding even more.

First, it seems that any `information’ the `time traveler’ could bring into the past — would change the time travelers future. If OUR time would have access to future information - so would the TT’s too (time travelers) - the TT’s time would have visitors from it’s future with their base of information, etc, etc, in an infinite regress INTO the future. In essence, the moment a TT appeared `here-now’ would be the moment `information became free’ - at least information that `existed within the determinism of a determined future’. But, is the future determined?

Really, there is no reason to be so esoteric — just imagine `going back’ — four minutes in time. Jumping back to something `close’ so to speak.

Now, don’t forget, to get into the room you were/are in you will have to factor in the data fact that the Earth rotates the sun at about 18.5 Miles per second - oh, and don’t forget that our galaxy and neighbors are moving at 600 km/s in the direction of the constellation Hydra (Scientific American). And, don’t forget that the rotation of the Earth is up to 1,600 km/hr at the equator.

To `go back’ two minutes into the room you are in, the chair you are seating in  - means to be where the earth was — 10’s of 1,000’s of miles away - from here now. AND, WHAT EARTH WOULD BE THERE?Aren’t we on a REAL planet? That has an inaccessible REAL PAST. And a real now.

Would the past be real if it could be changed? If the elements between then and now could have a new source of information (from the TT’s) - it would be changed.

The one thing we have as a singular observer is that the past cannot be changed - and therefore it LIVES and is counted thru our observation. And, while the only Real is with the present - observers know the past was (once-counted) present. Humans know, one cannot change the past - and that a future space, cannot be `present’ - as a `real space’. 

Interestingly, THS has a link on our phenomenology blog www.whatisnotabletonotbeis.blogspot.com asking `what can be changed’ - with answers of - the past, the now, the future, all of it, none of it. Why not go give your opinion - and read the phenomenology ideas that THS thinks may be the real answer.

Finally, THS has covered our take on Freewill and Determinism before right here - http://theheavystuff.com/?p=26 — perhaps our most picked up blogpost ~ Do Fruit Flies have freewill? Do Humans? ~

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